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Pictures Of You
Back to Stories Of The Metalverse Part 1 In the summer of 1993 Ford Hawks turned sixteen. He had just gotten out of the Scouts in the spring, leaving with good regard and gently turning down the invitation to be a lifelong member and maybe be a Scout Leader someday himself. He had said goodbye to the boys in his troop with a certain emotion, he knew it was the end of a defining period of is life but there was something more about the moment that tugged at his thoughts and feelings in a way he could not define. His sixteenth birthday was a quiet matter, his mom got him a new sketchbook and a Leatherman multitool, since he was fond of tinkering with things and she felt it was a grown up step above his old Scout knife. He was withdrawing from friends at that time so she convinced him to hang out and watch a Batman sixties tv show marathon. A week later he was at a Stone Temple Pilots gig in Seattle, the second half of her birthday present: she drove him up there and dropped him off at the show. Ford had been a Scout so long there was something quite utilitarian about his dress: he wore some canvas jeans, hiking boots, an Alice In Chains t-shirt. He was excited at being alone, a little socially uneasy but fundamentally fearless as always. He was already starting to sprout upwards and outwards, he'd been a neat, compact kid as a Scout but this last year had made him feel awkward and shambling, he hadn't the confidence to enjoy his new size and strength. He made his way into the venue, looking around with a little awe at the variety of people, styles, tastes on display here. The support act were on, they were a pretty awful trio who sounded a lot like a lot of other bands in Seattle that year. Ford made his way through the crowd carefully, trying not to bump anyone and sort of slowly squeezing his way towards the front. On his way there he saw a girl coming towards him. She had dyed black hair with long blonde roots, a long Smiths t-shirt worn as a dress and boots with a dazzling collection of buckles. Ford noticed a lot of this later though, for in this moment she was in distress and trying to make her way through the crowd. The press was too tight here at the front though and she couldn't get through. Ford raised his arms outwards and turned to the side, stepping back to gently force people out of her way. She moved into the gap and finally made eye contact, briefly put her hand on his chest and gave him a grateful look that might have been a smile if she weren't so dour-looking, then she was out of the crush and into the looser crowd and away. He wanted to go after her and talk to her but he was shy and it didn't even seem appropriate anyway, she had looked so desperate to get out of the crowd that she wasn't likely to welcome him bumbling around her trying to make conversation. What would he say, anyway? She'd think he was trying to capitalize on his very minor act of courtesy and that would rob the gesture of any small meaning it had held. So he didn't go after her. He stood at the front brooding about this until STP came on, then he was enraptured by one of his favourite bands at the height of their powers. They sounded incredible, Scott Wieland's sometimes obnoxious presence was cut with that confessional edge he could sometimes capture that swept the crowd up and brought them with him. They played for a couple of hours, even played an encore. Ford was heading out with everyone else when he paused to avoid the rush and leaned against a pillar, by some freak of acoustics happened to hear a couple of roadies a hundred yards away saying they were talking backstage of maybe playing a little more, see what happens. Instead of leaving he went to the bar for a Dr Pepper, stood with it watching the stage intently. "Hi," She said, almost resentfully. He hadn't noticed her standing beside him, not too close. He glanced down and wanted to smile but he couldn't quite get it together so he just nodded and raised his Dr Pepper and gave a slightly choked "Hey." They lapsed into silence, long and awkward, he could swear he could feel resentment from her for his failure to launch a conversation. "Did you catch the show? They were pretty amazing weren't they?" He asked, enthusiasm bubbling out through his shyness. "Not really. It was ok. It's not really my thing. Not really my decade, actually." "Oh? What do you like?" He glanced at her t-shirt and considered asking something about The Smiths but he'd never actually listened to them and he was afraid of how foolish he'd seem. He wished he'd gone for it, as she looked down at her shirt then back up at him, as though incredulous at his stupidity, but there was something a little humourous in there, taking the edge off the apparent cruelty. He had to smile. "Ok, so The Smiths. I'll just tell you the truth, I've never listened to them. My mom likes some stuff from around that time I guess, she's crazy about Echo and The Bunnymen, but I don't know The Smiths." She frowned, but something told him his instinct of truthfulness was right, at least he hadn't tried to bluff his way. Her frown softened at the mention of Echo and The Bunnymen. "They're pretty cool. Do you like them?" "I do, Mom has all their albums but she loves Ocean Rain the best. The Killing Moon always makes her cry, but it's my favourite song of theirs and I know it's hers too." His unselfconscious candour perhaps disarmed her slightly and she shrugged, though this time with a slight smile -a surprisingly shy smile, at that. It might have told Ford a lot about her if he'd been a little older and a little wiser but in this moment he was just glad to see it. "I was born in the wrong time," She declared conspiratorially with a confidence he envied, even as he failed to see through it to the awkward girl beneath. "I should have been born in the sixties, been a teenager for the whole punk thing and then been in my twenties for New Wave." Ford nodded, mutely impressed by her sense of music history, he wasn't absolutely sure what New Wave was, though he knew a lot of his favourite music was grunge that was directly descended from Punk. "I guess I'd have liked to be around to see Iggy live with The Stooges, that'd be cool. I'm uh, gonna go see The Cure in a couple of weeks, right here." There was a hopeful note in his voice, he hadn't quite asked her if she'd be here too but she caught it and shrugged, taking out a cigarette. Ford lit it for her with his father's old zippo and she rewarded him with a nod of thanks. He took a breath, looked into her eyes. "You stayed to the end, so maybe you like STP just a little bit. C'mon up to the front again with me, it's quiet now and they're about to come back on stage." He didn't know that for sure of course, but she nodded and fell into step beside him. As they walked the last few steps to the front of the now mostly deserted auditorium, the band came out from backstage and seemed to match them step for step til they met at the front of the stage. The secret encore was great, the band were loose and relaxed and what remained of the crowd were a loving audience. Ford was almost afraid to look down when the girl leaned her shoulder gently against his upper arm as she stood beside him and they stayed like that for a long time. When they finally finished up for the night, Ford walked her out to the front. His mom was waiting there in her beat-up Saab and the girl looked around and saw a car parked a couple of hundred yards away that she waved to. "Seeya." She said, but she didn't walk away yet. "I'll be here in a couple of weeks for The Cure and I'll look for you at the bar. I'll be wearing a white David Bowie t-shirt and I'll be right where we talked. And I'm Ford." "Ok." He waited for her to say more, but she just walked to that car and got in. He walked over to his mom's car and climbed into the passenger side, she immediately asked him who the girl was. "I have no idea, but she's into some cool stuff," Ford pronounced with some degree of reverence. On the ride home he quizzed her about her music tastes beyond Echo and The Bunnymen, gathering information about The Smiths and then into what New Wave meant. She had him dig out a couple of tapes as they went, they ended up listening to Blondie's Parallel Lines twice as they drove back to Portland. Part 2 In the two weeks until The Cure gig, Ford soaked up music his mom recommended. She got him into Joy Division, saying his father had loved them, it surprised him because it didn’t sound like something a policeman would listen to. The Smiths were a revelation. He’d been afraid he wouldn’t like them and if he saw the girl again he’d have to tell her- he hardly even entertained the notion of pretending- and then she definitely wouldn’t like him. Abby gave him The Queen Is Dead first, she said if he learned one Smiths album to learn this one. He went out and bought a very cheap secondhand bass guitar in a thrift store, started trying to play songs like ‘Control’ by Joy Division, he got a video on how to play the guitar and though it was quite different from bass he figured out a lot of fretwork from it. It was a good time, he was coming alive and Abby wondered if playing bass would be the thing that got him out of his shell, got him connecting with people. The night of The Cure gig, Ford was wearing the white David Bowie shirt as he’d promised, he arrived early and waited at the bar. She showed up during the support act -they were awful- and he realised he thought she was beautiful. She was wearing a gauzy black dress that was really more at home ten or fifteen years ago than it was now, but this being a Cure concert she didn’t even stick out or look odd. “You look…beautiful,” He said, awkwardness almost making him unable to say the word but his fearlessness allowing him to get it out. She shrugged, she had approached him but really an observer might not even be sure they knew each other yet. “I like your shirt. Ziggy Stardust is good.” She said it like she was allowing a point, validating Bowie’s entire body of work with her gracious dispensation. It almost made Ford smile, his inner mischief lighting up, but he wasn’t sure she’d think it was funny and he wanted so terribly for her to think he was cool and not some goofball who’s amused at everything. “What’s your favourite Cure song?” He asked, figuring to keep her on the topic where she could make pronouncements about taste, she seemed at ease there. “Pictures of You,” she said and he nodded, trying to hide his disappointment, feeling foolish for being disappointed at all. She’d picked a song from the right album, after all. “You?” She asked him in return, eventually. “Lovesong,” He said simply, unable to say it without shrugging, blushing slightly too. He didn’t even mean he loved her or anything crazy like that, he just meant… he wasn’t sure what he meant or why he wanted to share it with her. Maybe it was that he’d never been in love and he liked the vision of love in that song. He wanted love to be like that. She shrugged, but she looked at his deep, black eyes a moment. Then she looked towards the stage. “This support act is awful.” “I know, but they’ll be on soon,” Ford said with that peculiar certainty he could summon from time to time. He put an arm out to walk her towards the front, she glanced scornfully at him for it and walked ahead, then sort of fell behind to let him use his bulk to gently bulldoze to the front while she passed in his slipstream. Magnetic, strange Robert Smith walked on stage and gave one of those rare fleeting ‘don’t tell anybody I smiled’ smiles, then they launched into Plainsong, the opening track of Disintegration, Ford’s favourite Cure album and the one from which both Pictures of You and Lovesong came. A minute or so into the extended intro she put her arms around his waist and put the side of her head against his chest. He stood very still a moment, then gently put his left arm around her lower back. He had the presence of mind to realize this was another of those moments, the ones you never forget. Later he would question it from various angles but then and there, he felt it was a perfect moment. She stayed in his arms for the whole gig, they never even kissed but he couldn’t have asked for more. They didn’t play Lovesong that night, though. Part 3 She was the defining element of his sixteenth summer. She confessed she lived not fifteen minutes walk from his house, but she’d never really noticed him until the night of the Stone Temple Pilots. She had very definite ideas about what was cool and Ford was highly impressed with this, what’s more he usually concurred. She could sing. She could really, really sing. She and Ford found a couple of others and they formed a band “The Elements of Reprise”, the bandname was her idea. She could be cruel sometimes, offhand, but there was something there that Ford found irresistible. He would later admit that he had a crush on her the whole time they were going out. Out in the world she was different, she tried to make herself small by hunching her shoulders and she walked fast by anyone that might make fun of her, she wore her flambouyant clothes awkwardly as though they weren’t her own. Ford found her unutterably beautiful. Sometimes when they were alone she’d talk about how she wished she could live another life, somewhere exotic and interesting and somewhere in the past. Ford asked her once if she could ever accept this life enough to enjoy it and she said he was enough for her, he made this time and this life more than enough for her. He knew upon hearing them that these words would reside in his heart until the day he died, no matter what should come after. Ford had met her at a time when he wasn’t entirely sure of his identity, he’d just ‘got out’ of the Scouts -she’d make fun of him for talking about the Scouts as though it was the military and took to calling him Warchild- and he didn’t quite know where to go next, who to be. She filled that gap and he decided to be a musician, she could sing and be loved by the crowd while he stayed in the back playing bass. The summer wore on, when he looked back it seemed he spent that whole summer playing songs in her parents’ basement with her and a couple of girls from her school. When they went back to school they didn’t get to see each other every day, her parents were strict about her studies and he just saw her at weekends. Each weekend she seemed a little farther away, he never quite knew why. He held on though, only really feeling alive during those times, sick with the need to see her when they were apart. She’d given him a corded necklace that she’d sprayed with her scent and he’d hold it sometimes, close his eyes and think if she were only here, he’d know what to say to stop her drifting any further away. One weekend in January she told him she was going to New York to study music, it was a larger world there and even if the time was wrong, at least the geography was right. He didn’t say “But what about what you said, that I’m enough for you”, because he didn’t think it would help and because he didn’t want to hear her answer. Somehow people had heard the name Warchild and occasionally people called him that at school. They didn’t say it with any particular cruelty, it was more as though they’d previously thought his name was Pete and now they realized it was Frank, so Frank was what they called him. He grew used to the nickname and stopped even questioning it by the time graduation came about. He didn’t hear from her again after she went to New York, until one last time. He tried to call her, write to her, call again. He got her dorm one evening and someone passed her the phone. “Hi. It’s Ford.” “Ford.” She said, he thought he could hear contempt in her voice and wondered where it came from. Contempt and a terrible weariness, as though just saying his name was immensely tiring, or perhaps tiresome. He tried to make conversation, ask her how she was doing over there. She sighed, then said in a gentler tone than she’d used with him thus far in the conversation: “You’re my past, Ford. Maybe you’re just a small part of it but someday that will be enough for you. It will have to be, I’m finished with you.” The hurt left him hollow and strangely tired, though he couldn’t sleep for days. He wasn’t angry at her, he wasn’t sure he wanted her back, but she was his first love and his first heartbreak. He listened to Pictures of You over and over again, sitting on the windowsill of his loft bedroom. Over and over, sometimes throughout the night, until one summer evening Abby brought him home the new Stone Temple Pilots album, Purple. She put it on his stereo, lit a joint and passed it to him, sat opposite him in the fading light of dusk and smiled with a tender, beautiful warmth that reminded him he was loved. A difficult thought to get through to his young mind: he was loved. Maybe not by the girl he wanted, maybe by his mom -that made him smile at how dorky it sounded, like when that kid said ‘my mom says I’m cool’ in The Simpsons- but he was loved. He took the joint from her and took a big inhale, waited a long time before exhaling. He felt relief as he did, letting out some of the pain and bewilderment of heartbreak. “Do you think a comic strip about a really lazy superhero could be cool?” He asked her, passing back the joint. “Yeah. Yeah I do,” She said almost gravely, only cracking the slightest smile. “Cool. Maybe he’s just been dumped by like, a female superhero, he’s trying to get his head together… nah. Fuckit. He’s just this lazy superhero, we don’t need to define him by the girl that didn’t want him, huh?” Apate smiled. “You’re going to be fine, son.” Back to Stories Of The Metalverse